Bi monthly project server user group

Last week I conducted the bi monthly project and project server user group in Adelaide for August. My presentation was around whats new in Project Server 2007, which allowed participants to check out the great new ( and not so great new) features in PS2007. We had about 35 participants with quite a lot of interest and questions around resource management. Based on the feedback I received it would probably be a good idea to make this the topic of the next session.

Updating Global Material Resource using "My Task"

For all of you who have to work with Material Resource this may be of interest. I had the challenge that an organisation had to capture data (Hectare) for each Project they are working on, so I created a Material Resource called it Hectare and off we went :)

The Main problem was that this Material resource needs to be updated using PWA's - My Task. Sure you can assign a Default Assignment Owner to the Material Resource, but what happens when the Assignment Owner changes on a project to project bases?

Here are the steps you will need to go through in order to assign material resource work to different Assignment owners:

- Open Project Professional
- Build your team and include your material resource
- create a task and assign the material resource to the task
- go to the resource usage view
- insert the Column "Assignment Owner"
- now you can assign a different assignment owner per material resource per task, making it a very flexible way to capture different data.
- all there is left is publishing the project and the assignment owner will now see that task for the material resource in their "My Task"

That will allow you to capture quite a different numbers of data that your organisation may need for Projects.

Now you can report against the "Material Work" and "Material Actual Work" using the Data Analyser or even the report builder within SQL 2005 allowing you to create time phased reports.

Cooooool :)

My TechEd Presentation in Australia

Well, another month has passed and I have not updated my blog AGAIN. In my defence, I was very busy at work and in preparing my TechEd Australia Presentation. The subject I presented on was around Project Server 2007 Timesheets and Enterprise Reporting using PS07 Out of the box functionality plus MOSS Excel Services, MOSS KPI Lists, Reporting Services and Report Builder.

It is always hard to present to predominantly technical focused people, that's why I have broken down the presentation into 2 sections, Timesheet for business users and Enterprise Reporting for Techies. Considering that it is at the TechEd, I actually had about 100-110 people at the presentation.

I think the preso went well, with lots of questions after the session, plus I actually very much enjoyed myself. It was my first TechEd visit and therefore my first TechEd presentation as a speaker.

The next conference I am very much looking forward to is the Project Server Conference in Seattly in October. Lookign forward seeing some faces that I typically only see at the conference.
Till next time